Aftermath (7 page)

I glanced around at the nuked terrain. “Can’t say it’s started all that well either.”

Rahim handed me the rolled pages. “See if Rala can make sense of these. Maybe there’s an answer hidden somewhere in there. Rachelle and I will go to the prison and keep an eye out. Join us as soon as you can.”

“Will do.”

I was left alone right after I’d gotten the words out. Rachelle peeled open a gate and the pair stepped through and disappeared once the portal writhed shut behind them. I let my shield drop and drew in a deep, bracing breath of irradiated air. It burned going down like a cheap cigar or good meth.

I shook the thought from my head and made ready for my trip down south when I spied the barest of movements in the gloom encompassing the trees. My senses slipped loose and I picked up someone’s mystical essence for just a second before the aura was yanked back and put under lock and key. It was a dead emptiness after that, simply gone. The wind shifted and cleared the nuclear fog and I caught sight of the gleam of silver armor, a man standing there. Or at least that was the impression I got, only a quick glimpse settling in the brainpan.

The figure had on a silvery chain cowl that covered the entirety of his face except for tiny slits at his eyes. From a distance I couldn’t identify their color or see anything beyond the darkened depressions in the cowl. I could feel his stare on me though, piercing and calculating, cold and uncomfortable. My power welled up in response to the bold stare down in the middle of nowhere but it appeared as if he wasn’t gunning for a fight. Whoever the figure was, he slipped back into the whirling soup that had collected around the trees and fled the range of my senses quick-like. I thought about following and beating some answers out of him but I was on the clock, another bomb ready to go off any moment. There simply wasn’t time to be chasing ghosts. Besides, I would be facing down one of my own in just a few minutes and didn’t need to go adding more to the pile.

I hadn’t chatted with Rala since before everything went south in my life and didn’t figure us talking was going to improve things, especially after I told her what I’d done. Still, there wasn’t any point in putting it off any longer.

Seemed I was going to Hell both literally and figuratively.

Chapter Six

Whoever coined the phrase, ‘There’s no place like home,’ was an idiot.

Hell had been my home for a while after I’d screwed things up with DRAC and needed someplace to hide out and let everyone cool off. The place damn near drove me insane. Of course having Azrael, the Grim Reaper and Angel of Death himself, inside my head might have had a lot to do with that. Well, at least a little. I was probably bugshit crazy to begin with so hanging out with Chatterbox and a bunch of dread fiends only exacerbated it. But at least it had been relatively quiet.

These days Hell was home to hundreds of people, survivors of the attack against the all the various DRAC headquarters spread across the world by the United States Army. Shaw had turned them against us in a petty attempt at revenge for my kidnapping her and Venai while we were in God’s prison domain. Mind you, all that worked out for the best, all of us getting back to Earth alive and in one piece but Shaw’s not one to be reasonable. Neither am I unfortunately. She escalated and I escalated and shit turned ugly for everyone. The least I could do was offer up a safe place for all the employees of DRAC until the world settled and they could return up top without fear of the DSI or US government trying to kill them. How long that might take was a mystery, and it made returning to Hell an interesting experience.

I popped into my quarters, which were once Lucifer’s, and found it exactly as I’d left it; dirty, unorganized, and a little rank. My bed was unmade and the sheets and blankets were crumpled at the foot. It looked inviting, and I could have sworn it called to me but I wasn’t there for that no matter how much I would have loved to crawl into bed and sleep until Armageddon rang the front bell.

Too much depended on me to do that though, so I ignored the siren song of my mattress and made my way out into the hallway beyond my chambers. To my surprise silence greeted me.

When I’d left there were people in makeshift camps all up and down the halls, finding whatever place they could to call their own while we piled more and more survivors on top of them. I’d ordered the dread fiends to construct real rooms for them all and it seemed as if they’d managed that task in record time. They’d also taken my advice to move the DRAC folks as far from my quarters as possible, for which I owed them a treat or two. Hell had become a sanctuary of sorts for me. While it didn’t do much for my mental health it was a great place to avoid the world at large. Wading through and army of refugees blew that concept out of the water.

I made my way down the hall and marveled at the adjustments, the fiends having redirected the flow of the visitor living areas so they were inaccessible from my chambers. If I wanted to deal with the DRAC folks I would have to go through the private areas I’d marked as off limits to them and circle around to the more communal areas I’d designated as New DRAC City.

Ice-T’s rhymes flowed through my head as I slipped through the quiet caverns and made my way toward Rala’s chambers. She and Vol, her blind and uppity mentor, had been housed in a small but comfortable antechamber off the main thoroughfare where they could escape the clatter of the rest of Hell yet be nearby should they want the company. At the closed door to their room I knocked, hearing a slight shuffle from inside not long after.

Rala opened the door and stared at me, her eyes wide.

“Who is it?” Vol asked in the background. She didn’t bother to answer.

The soft orange of Rala’s fur stood out to me after having been around normal humans for long. The zebra-like stripes that ran from the base of her nose across the top of her head were darker and were scrunched tight as surprise leapt across her face at seeing me. There was no telling if it was good surprise or bad. She looked even older now that she had the last time I’d seen her, right before I took off on my World Pity Tour.

The whipcord thinness she’d come to Earth with was long gone, replaced with a fullness that made me feel guilty about noticing it. She had grown up…a lot…and had become a striking young lady despite the obvious alienness of her features. Long gone was the little street rat I’d lured away from her world with lies of peace and prosperity.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“Nice to see you too, kid.”

“Ah, it’s the Shadowman, the king of masks, come with words of honey and poison.”

“Always a pleasure, Vol,” I told the blind old man, waving at him as though he could actually see me. He’d always been a few bolts short of erector set but I was beginning to think his rambling carried far more weight than I’d given it credit for. He was hitting a home run as far as predicting my reasons for being there and, if I looked closely enough, he was spot on with the description too.

I didn’t like it one bit.

“Can we talk?” I whispered and motioned down the hall with my eyes so I didn’t have to hear Vol start in again.

She nodded. “Be right back.” The old man started up but she shut the door before he got going, his disgruntled voice cut off mid-grump.

The two of us strolled a ways down the hall, headed back toward my chambers, and I stopped after a few moments and drew in a deep breath. None of what I had to say would be easy but I needed to get it out. I owed Rala that much. Still, I started with something a bit easier.

“I’m sorry about disappearing the way I did.”

She shrugged. “You don’t owe me an explanation, Frank. With all that happened I would have been more worried if you managed to hold it together and stuck around.”

I bit back a chuckle. More often than not I forgot just how smart and stable she was compared to me. She’d probably be a kid to me forever but she’d grown up in a world that would have eaten her alive if she’d been stupid or complacent or just plain weak. She was none of those.

“Yeah, I know. Just feel I brought you here only to end up making your life more difficult. That really wasn’t my intention.”

“I know that,” she said, offering up a slight smile. “Despite it all we’re safer than we were on Feluris. Most times, at least.”

I forced myself to smile back. “Well, those days of foolish adventure are done. For you at least.” I pulled out the rolled sheets of paper we’d taken from the prison and held them out. “I on the other hand still have some hoops to jump through but I need your help finding them first.”

She took the pages and peeled them back so she could see what was on them. Her eyes narrowed as soon as she did. “Where did you get these?”

“Classified,” I answered while trying to not actually answer.

“Or it’s simply better that I don’t know how you keep stumbling across horribly familiar alien languages that have no place or business being found here on Earth?”

“Or it could be that.”

She groaned. “I’m going to regret translating this aren’t I?”

“More like
I’m
going to regret you doing it but I’m kind of stuck between the hammer and the anvil with this one and my ass is taking a beating. These things are important.” I drew in a deep, tired breath and played the ace I should have never let slip past my tongue. Old habits die hard it seems. “Abigail’s life might just depend on the information contained in these pages.”

Rala simply nodded like a good person would, no hint in her expression that I was manipulating her. She had a way better poker face than me because she had to know what I was doing.

“I’ll get to work but this isn’t the exact same language I speak or that’s used in the book. Similar but not the same. It could take a little time to get all the nuances down.”

“The sooner, the better.”

“Gotcha.”

“Thank you,” I said and turned away though I knew I wouldn’t get far in my attempt to flee.

“Hey. Can I ask you something?”

“If it’s about the dragons and the bees you might want to bring it up with Vol. I’m not up to date on the current mating rituals of wyverns.”

She came around me so we were face to face once more, and I noticed she’d grown taller too. Her eyes bored into me in a way that made me very uncomfortable. I knew what she was gonna ask before she even started and I
so
didn’t want to have this conversation.

“Have you seen Veronica?” she said. “I know we’ve been locked up here in Hell and out of touch but I figured she would have stopped in to say hi or something.”

I swallowed hard and forced myself not to look away. As a succubus, Veronica had put Rala under her spell from early on and had inadvertently made the girl care about her more than she might have normally but I had been afraid that there was more to it than that. Looked as if I’d been right to worry. The fact that she was asking about her this long after the ex-wife’s power had last been exerted meant that a bunch of the feelings I saw in her eyes right then were legitimate and not just a side effect of hanging around Veronica’s aura of sexuality. Realizing that took the wind out of my sails. The girl truly cared about my ex-wife.

And I had put a bullet in Veronica’s head.

I didn’t regret doing it—she’d placed my daughter in harm’s way with her machinations—but I damn sure didn’t want to have to tell Rala what I’d done to her
friend
. And that was exactly what I was gonna have to do.

“I uh…yeah…” The words were slow to come. It’s hard being a grownup.

Rala crooked an eyebrow but stayed quiet, letting me get there at my own pace. She knew something was up because of my avoidance and the pressure built in the silence.

“She’s not, uh, gonna be around anymore,” I finally said, the words tripping off my tongue as though they were leaping from a burning building.

“Why not?”

The question was innocent enough but I could see the concern growing in her posture, in the way the lines on her face paled. Maybe she’d heard something or just knew in her gut that something had happened to Veronica. Regardless the reason she had no intention of letting me off the hook.

“Tell me, Frank.”

I let out a loud sigh. “She offered up my daughter on a silver platter, trading Abby’s life for her own.”

Rala’s eyes went wide. I couldn’t tell if it was shock at what I’d told her or if she didn’t believe me but she still wouldn’t let it go. “What do you mean?”

“Rebecca Shaw, the leader of the Department of supernatural Investigation was using Veronica, putting the screws to her. I stumbled across her talking to one of the DSI flunkies, the demon Thud. Shaw wanted me taken out and let Judas use the crazed holy rollers, Trinity, who wanted my daughter and I dead, to do the deed. Veronica betrayed us and was gonna hand me and my kid over to them so she could walk away with her neck intact. And yours.”

The little alien covered her mouth and backed up a step. She knew exactly what I was gonna say next having seen my sense of
justice
in action.

“I killed her, Rala,” I said, no longer holding back. “It had been a long time coming and while I could have forgotten, or at least pushed aside, her sticking her knives in my back for the umpteenth time I could never forgive her for offering my child up as a sacrifice to save her ass. I just couldn’t. These people killed Karra right in front of me and would have done the same to Abigail. There’s no coming back from crossing that line. Not for anyone.”

Tears spilled from Rala’s eyes and while I didn’t know whether they were for Veronica or for Abigail or simply for Rala herself, I knew one thing for absolute certain. They weren’t for me.

The little alien spun away and bolted down the hallway.

“Rala, wait!” I called out but she ignored me and I didn’t try again, her footsteps stomping into the distance until they finally fell silent.

Instinct had told me to lie to spare the kid’s feelings—and to save my ass the grief—but decency demanded I be honest. It was the right thing to do. But as much as she deserved the truth I regretted having told her. Sadly there was nothing that could be done about it now. She knew and if we were ever to speak again it would be because she came to terms with what I’d had to do. That would be a tall order for anyone to handle, to admit their friend deserved to die.